Mission Bay, model of housing diversity in San Francisco

Several elements - city living, the natural environment and public meeting place - coalesce at the Mission Creek promenade.

Several elements - city living, the natural environment and public meeting place - coalesce at the Mission Creek promenade.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

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Several elements - city living, the natural environment and public meeting place - coalesce at the Mission Creek promenade.

Several elements - city living, the natural environment and public meeting place - coalesce at the Mission Creek promenade.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Mission Bay, model of housing diversity in San Francisco

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Mission Bay is one of those neighborhoods that all judgmental San Franciscans - these days are there any other kind? - dismiss with disdain.

The architecture is boxy and bland. The retail scene's anemic. It feels too new.

But standing on a hillock in a grassy park along Mission Creek one recent afternoon, I see something else: all manner of housing for all types of people.

Across the way are midsize blocks of condominiums that sell for what the market will bear, but also a building with generous balconies that contains 139 apartments for low-income seniors. Directly behind me, construction crews are adding the final details to a new 124-unit complex that includes 99 affordable apartments, 50 of them for formerly homeless families. At the end of Mission Creek are 20 honest-to-gosh houseboats; peeking up to the north is the top of One Rincon, the condo tower next to the Bay Bridge.

This is a sampler of the living options available in San Francisco, it is varied and mostly new, and that's the point. It's living proof that as the city, and the Bay Area as a whole, wrestles with the demand for housing, we need places to live that are as diverse as our population.

Obvious as this may sound - let a thousand domicile types bloom! - it bucks the trend of single-answer solutions being pushed by various factions in a city that has made being fractured a high art.

One camp infers that we should follow the lead of Houston and do away with zoning. "If people want to live in San Francisco, and they don't want rent to go up, then we need to build more units for people to live in," argued tech reporter Kyle Russell at the website Business Insider. "With taller buildings, San Francisco would be able to fit more housing and thus lower rents."

On the other end are activists who would be happy if nothing was built save subsidized units by nonprofit developers. This argument is summed up by Calvin Welch, a longtime leader of the city's left, who last year released a study of housing permits and prices that concluded: "When there is a decline in production of market rate housing, there is a decline in price. ... New construction of market rate housing will never meet the housing needs of current residents and we should move on from that dangerous 'urban myth.' "

Everyone has their absolute. Inevitably, the absolutes collide.

Mission Bay offers a different view of what's possible. By no means ideal, but instructive and even a little heartening all the same.

Like too many recent additions to the landscape, it has a tangled history of political grandstanding and even a ballot showdown or two. Willie Brown was the fourth mayor to wrestle with how to revive 300 acres of decrepit railroad yards; in arguably the most substantive accomplishment of his eight years in office, he worked out a deal with landowner Catellus where UCSF was given 43 acres for the creation of a new campus. That, in turn, set the ball rolling for a mixed-use redevelopment area that will include 6,000 housing units, 30 percent of them reserved for low-income residents.

In hindsight, more housing would have made sense, with a sprinkling of towers beyond the official 16-story limit. But city leaders were skittish about heights back then, and they wanted to finally make something happen.

There's a much different neighborhood emerging north of the Bay Bridge, where zoning for the Rincon Hill and Transbay areas encourages residential towers of 400 feet and more. Three went up before the economy nose-dived in 2008, and eight more are on the rise. There's no neighborhood yet, more a checkerboard of construction sites and sky-high shafts. When several thousand newcomers move in, and some towers include shops along landscaped sidewalks, that might change.

Would I want to live in an aerie above the Bay Bridge? No. I wouldn't want to live in a 300-square-foot "micro-unit" either. Or a 5,000-square-foot mansion in Pacific Heights. But in a city of neighborhoods, the more types of neighborhood the better. Some low-slung a la the Sunset. Some tall and dense with a Chicago sheen, as will be the case on Rincon Hill.

Mission Bay teaches us something else about the current "housing crisis." It's a chronic condition dating back to the 1980s, when San Francisco attained the dubious honor of being the nation's priciest big city.

"Affordable housing ... is central to the character of the city and remains our most urgent priority," then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein wrote in 1986 by way of introducing a report on her administration's housing efforts: "The battle is by no means over," she intoned, but "despite the tough odds, housing is being produced within the reach of lower and moderate-income persons."

One year later, Art Agnos launched his successful campaign for mayor with a speech promising to ensure that "young families and senior citizens and working people can afford to buy a home or rent in our city." He also vowed to protect "those who enrich our diversity and uniqueness ... the newcomers ... the artists and the crafts workers."

The cynics would say that today's obscenely high prices mean that past efforts were futile. But today's tensions over the issue are proof that diversity has endured. Despite its very real imperfections, this city continues to attract people from a confounding array of cultures and aspirations who come for a visit and then find ways to stay. They make themselves a home, in all meanings of that word.

Houseboats, towers, the well-planned blocks of Mission Bay - they're part of today's San Francisco every bit as much as Victorian homes. Not only that, this is how it should be.